Are Carousels good for UX
Having worked many years in the web design sector, we have seen many fads and gimmicky “gadgets” used to capture the user’s attention. This has included carousels (also known as slide shows, rotating offers etc), generally these were placed in the head of a webpage to highlight the products or services offered by the website owners and would generally rotate product images or text.
A few years ago, carousels were deemed as “cool” and a great way of delivering several important products or services at any one time without taking much of the webpage’s space.
But are carousels good for you visitors UX (User Experience)?
We are not suggesting that using carousels is a bad thing, but website owners should consider the following.
A Few considerations when using a carousel on your website.
- Carousels can have a negative impact on a visitor’s experience.
Your webpage users like to be in control of their website experience, this can be greatly impacted by a carousel that is set to scroll at a speed that you feel is right, but is actually too fast to read for the user. - A large quantity of slides will not improve visibility of your products or services.
The click-through rate for carousel slides falls massively after the first 2 or 3 rotations. - Page-load speed increases. Many slides add to the weight of the page and slow page-load speeds also have a massive negative impact on SEO.
- Poor mobile adaptation. Many years ago, we only used desktop machines, a nice widescreen format with a lot of screen space to fill with your carousel. Desktop usage has significantly fallen since the introduction of tablets and mobile phones.
Finally, it has to be said that google places great emphasis on user experience (UX) and will penalise raking if it deems a site to have bad UX. Therefore, the above should be given some thought on using carousels.
